People in rural areas. I can get an analog telephone line at my home (but I didn't bother; I use my cell phone), but cannot get DSL or ISDN because the telephone switch is too far away.
I know there are places like this. However, I laugh every time I hear it. My parents live in a small town of about 3500 people. The next town over is about 45 miles away with 13000 people. They have fiber with about 40Mbps. I live in a city of about 2 million. The best I can currently get is about 4Mbps.
Except that in a 5 light cluster, the bottom lights are always the TURN ARROWS.
I've never seen that arrangement. In all of the 5 light cluster signals I've seen, the bottom left is green turn, bottom right is solid green, middle left is yellow turn, middle right is yellow, and the top light is red. I'm sure there are several different ways of arranging the lights though. It just means you can't depend on a single arrangement of lights to tell you to go or stop.
I was thinking the same thing. I lived in a small town for several years. The weekly paper always published the names of people that had been charged and convicted of a crime. It didn't matter if it was a parking ticket, or breaking and entering.
I've seen several of your posts now and I have to wonder, where do you live? Earlier you stated that you make $30,000 and pay 50% in taxes. I'm in the $40,000 range and don't pay anywhere near that much. Now you talk about DOT directly employing the guys that hold up stop/slow signs and paying them above market wages. In my area, DOT does not directly employ construction workers. Construction workers work for private construction companies. DOT offers them the opportunity to bid on contracts. As to their wage, it is based on the danger and environment of their job. You would be amazed at how many morons try to run them over. Add to that, they don't get to drop the sign and come in out of the weather.
I also wonder about your continued reference to "above market wages". Do you live in an area where the government directly competes with private enterprise? Perhaps you have a choice of several competing water utilities, including the city water utility? If not, then how can you claim people are earning above market wages in a market without competition?
So, that's nice and all for all the well meaning urbanites, but a couple billion people around the planet are supposed to then live on "eco tourism"?
No eco-tourism. It is clear that we need to encase the few remaining natural areas in a glass bubble and remove all humans. One must remember that humans, having appeared in this dimension only about 6000 years ago, are not natural. It is best to encase these humans in densely packed concrete cubes. We can call these cubes condominiums if the humans are considered well-off, or apartments otherwise. Perhaps we can feed them soylent green. It has green in the name, so it must be good.
In all seriousness, I do agree with most of your post. One thing I remember reading about though is the wild fires. It seems that fire is a necessary part of forest life. Without it, underbrush doesn't get cleared. It also helps with new trees and nutrients. The big problem with wild fires is that they were prevented for 100 or so years. Too much underbrush accumulated. This made the wild fires burn much hotter than normal. Most trees can survive a wild fire. However, in a forest where regular wildfires were prevented, when you finally did get an unpreventable fire, it was massive and hot. It burned everything down and left nothing but ash and mud. There are also a few species of tree that can't reproduce without fire. The redwood for example. So small, regular wild fires are needed.
I suspect the GP is talking about the interactive features of Zone Alarm.
Yea, I should have caught that. I wonder if TuxGuardian is more what the GP is looking for. From their site:
TuxGuardian was developed after the observation that Linux security applications were not tailored for lay users. With TuxGuardian you'll be able to implement access control policies to the network resources in order to identify and control every application that tries to access the network.
I remember seeing a conversation in the UBuntu forums a while back. It was talking about how application level firewalls didn't offer much protection. Someone had asked about Zone Alarm for Linux. The reply was that it would be difficult to implement because many of the tools you want to access the net can also be used to do Bad Things. For example my Linux distribution uses wget to download updates. However, wget can be used by any script to upload information from your system or download payloads. If you block wget, you block both the good and bad applications that make use of it.
Zone Alarm checks to see if the binary has changed since it last connected to the net. This is good. However, does it also check all of the settings? Wouldn't it be possible to construct an application in Windows that seemed beneficial to end user and had the ability to update itself over the net? The application binary wouldn't need to change to do Bad Things. It could be a data file it uses, or a different site it points to.
I've seen some conversation concerning the restrictions available that can isolate an application to prevent this kind of damage. SELinux seems like a match. It is difficult to set up. However, it can control what various applications can access. AppArmor offers similar protection based on path names.
Linux needs a program that performs the same function as Zone Alarm
It is called Netfilter and it is built into the kernel. For low-level configuration, take a look at the iptables command. Several hundred programs offer "simpler" configuration tools, from command line to GUI. Take a look at the L7-filter for application layer packet classification.
The main difference between windows and linux is that the linux kernel has so many different versions, and not all distros are using the same one, so that it's hard to choose which kernel vulnerability to exploit. if 99% of people used linux, and were using the same distribution (with mostly the same kernel), believe me, these exploits would exist, and we would see viruses hitting linux machines over the network.
So, what you are saying, is everyone using the exact same code on their computers is a security risk. That if 20% used Windows, 20% used Ubuntu, 20% used BSD, 20% used OSX, and 20% used something else, overall security would increase. It makes you wonder why everyone insists on running the exact same code.
Not sure what your point was. Were you saying that there isn't any science in your post?
I found the answer in a wikipedia link provided in another message. The link suggests that the sleepiness is not caused by tryptophan alone. Rather, carbohydrates trigger the release of insulin. Insulin causes muscle to take in LNAA, but not tryptophan. This leaves a larger ratio of tryptophan in the blood to be taken across the blood-brain barrier into the central nervous system. There it is converted into serotonin. The serotonin is metabolized into melatonin. Melatonin makes you sleepy.
So, tryptophan by itself does not make you sleepy. However, tryptophan combined with carbohydrates leads to the right conditions needed to make you sleepy. It has nothing to do with stuffing yourself. Nor is tryptophan's involvement a myth. It just needs the right conditions. Skip the mashed potatoes and you shouldn't get sleepy from turkey.
Of course, the Nvidia-applet works fine, doing anything with the TV of my liking. But it would require the user to know that she uses a Nvidia card, and that there is another applet that she needs to use. Not good.
How is this different from Windows? If I want to do something special with graphics output under XP, I use the Intel applet that sits in the system tray. ATI and nVidia also have their own special applets under Windows.
If I had to guess, you have a somewhat old Intel chipset (945?). They have hardware limitations which prevent the total virtual screen from being > 2048x2048.
I've been wondering about this. My laptop has a 945 and dual-boots XP and Gentoo. Though I had to install a utility to get the monitor resolution to work with XP, XP has no problem putting 2048x1152 next to 1280x800. I can't get this to work on the Linux side. I can stack them top and bottom, but not side to side. If this is a hardware problem, how does XP get around it?
So I have to ask then, what in turkey does induce sleepiness? I don't believe it is a matter of stuffing yourself. For Christmas dinner, I traditionally eat duck. The rest of the meal is very similar to Thanksgiving dinner. Yet I don't feel sleepy after Christmas dinner. For that matter, I tend to eat about as much on Thanksgiving and Christmas as I do any other night. Yet the Turkey dinner is the only one that makes me sleepy. I can even eat a Turkey TV dinner and get sleepy.
Maybe it is not the tryptophan, but there is something in turkey that makes me sleepy.
The days are so far long gone when building your own box was a qualification for being a nerd (somewhat sadly, but only somewhat.) Now it is a qualification for being a factory worker, producing cheaply assembled and cheaply purchased commodities.
Huh? Showing an interest in how each component in the computer inter-operates no longer qualifies you as a nerd? I'll agree that the term "nerd" has greatly expanded to include a large field of specialized interests. However, an interest in computer hardware still qualifies. As to the factory workers, sure they know that part 4A6BX plugs into socket 893GH. However, putting that part into that socket 5 billion times a day hardly qualifies as an interest. Next you are going to tell me that soldering commonly available transistors, resistors, and other components together to build your own custom interfaces doesn't qualify.
but it should be decided by the board, not by one employee.
Ah yes, software requirements dictated by a board of computer illiterates that were elected into office by other computer illiterates. I agree that software selection should follow a policy. However, the school board should not be making those decisions. Though their input should be considered.
A good example: Linux is banned in our local school district. Why, because the school board mandated that all computers in the district run Norton Antivirus. How was this decided? A Best Buy salesman told a school board member that all of their computers come preinstalled with a three-month subscription to Norton Antivirus and that all computers need this protection. Thus it was mandated that all school computers specifically have Norton installed.
Basic cable costs money (and, hint, its not worth it). Unplug while you still can
I agree because I can get all of the things you list from OTA or the Internet. Now, the Internet isn't free. Truth is I pay way too much for the limited service I receive. However, OTA is free. In an area where you do have good OTA service, why would you pay for basic cable?
I can. Where I work (as in most places I imagine), the IT department handles the network and helpdesk. IT also includes database administrators. While the database admins can write some really good SQL, they don't know jack about networks or computer maintenance. This is all fine and good. However, management doesn't know jack about IT. So we end up with a bunch of database administrators trying to run a network and maintain computers. And management wonders why everything is falling apart all of the time.
Keeping the titles separate might help management make the distinction between the database guys and network engineers.
But for embedded/minimalist supporters, it means they need to add more hardware to their machines to support the now-larger kernel, chock full of features they'll never need or want.
I'm not a kernel programmer. So I don't know for sure which features are dependent on other features. However, if it is a matter of different feature sets, why not just disable the features you don't need? I've configured hundreds of Linux kernels. The kernel is highly customizable.
I have a Facebook account that I occasionally use to keep in touch with friends and family. I also rent videos from Blockbuster and I've ordered from Overstock. I've never had anything show up on my Facebook page that said anything about my shopping activities. Is this some kind of opt-in program?
Yes, it still requires research and engineering. However, that is a far cry from "no earthly use for it".As for your second point, the article also covers that: "The moon contains 10 times more energy in the form of Helium 3 than all the fossil fuels on the earth," So you are right, it is a limited resource.
What material are you proposing that we could acquire in space more economically than on earth?
Helium-3 comes to mind. As to the composition of asteroids, I wasn't aware that a thorough examination of the asteroid belt had taken place. I know some asteroids have been studied. However, there is a lot of material out there.
Now, getting it back to Earth might be costly. However, I think it is a bit premature to claim that space doesn't have anything that couldn't be obtained cheaper on Earth.
The news made me happy and led me to check in on the status of other once-prominent OSes
Though I'm not sure I'd call it prominent, I was really surprised to find that SpartaDOS for the Atari 8-bit is still actively being developed. The current version is 4.42, released on 12/25/2008. You can download it from http://trub.atari8.info/index.php?ref=sdx_upgrade_en
By the way, if anyone knows how to access the H1: drive from this OS under the atari800 emulator, please let me know. It keeps telling the device dosn't exist.
Give it time. Though Bob was just an interface, not a complete OS. I'm still waiting for someone to take a 3D avatar, combine it with natural speech processing, voice recognition, and speech synthesis, and sell it as an interface. With advances made in 3D on embedded devices, you could be asking Bob to dial a number for you.
Slashdot Mirror
People in rural areas. I can get an analog telephone line at my home (but I didn't bother; I use my cell phone), but cannot get DSL or ISDN because the telephone switch is too far away.
I know there are places like this. However, I laugh every time I hear it. My parents live in a small town of about 3500 people. The next town over is about 45 miles away with 13000 people. They have fiber with about 40Mbps. I live in a city of about 2 million. The best I can currently get is about 4Mbps.
Except that in a 5 light cluster, the bottom lights are always the TURN ARROWS.
I've never seen that arrangement. In all of the 5 light cluster signals I've seen, the bottom left is green turn, bottom right is solid green, middle left is yellow turn, middle right is yellow, and the top light is red. I'm sure there are several different ways of arranging the lights though. It just means you can't depend on a single arrangement of lights to tell you to go or stop.
I was thinking the same thing. I lived in a small town for several years. The weekly paper always published the names of people that had been charged and convicted of a crime. It didn't matter if it was a parking ticket, or breaking and entering.
You are thinking of Trademarks. Patents do not have this clause.
I've seen several of your posts now and I have to wonder, where do you live? Earlier you stated that you make $30,000 and pay 50% in taxes. I'm in the $40,000 range and don't pay anywhere near that much. Now you talk about DOT directly employing the guys that hold up stop/slow signs and paying them above market wages. In my area, DOT does not directly employ construction workers. Construction workers work for private construction companies. DOT offers them the opportunity to bid on contracts. As to their wage, it is based on the danger and environment of their job. You would be amazed at how many morons try to run them over. Add to that, they don't get to drop the sign and come in out of the weather.
I also wonder about your continued reference to "above market wages". Do you live in an area where the government directly competes with private enterprise? Perhaps you have a choice of several competing water utilities, including the city water utility? If not, then how can you claim people are earning above market wages in a market without competition?
So, that's nice and all for all the well meaning urbanites, but a couple billion people around the planet are supposed to then live on "eco tourism"?
No eco-tourism. It is clear that we need to encase the few remaining natural areas in a glass bubble and remove all humans. One must remember that humans, having appeared in this dimension only about 6000 years ago, are not natural. It is best to encase these humans in densely packed concrete cubes. We can call these cubes condominiums if the humans are considered well-off, or apartments otherwise. Perhaps we can feed them soylent green. It has green in the name, so it must be good.
In all seriousness, I do agree with most of your post. One thing I remember reading about though is the wild fires. It seems that fire is a necessary part of forest life. Without it, underbrush doesn't get cleared. It also helps with new trees and nutrients. The big problem with wild fires is that they were prevented for 100 or so years. Too much underbrush accumulated. This made the wild fires burn much hotter than normal. Most trees can survive a wild fire. However, in a forest where regular wildfires were prevented, when you finally did get an unpreventable fire, it was massive and hot. It burned everything down and left nothing but ash and mud. There are also a few species of tree that can't reproduce without fire. The redwood for example. So small, regular wild fires are needed.
I suspect the GP is talking about the interactive features of Zone Alarm.
Yea, I should have caught that. I wonder if TuxGuardian is more what the GP is looking for. From their site:
TuxGuardian was developed after the observation that Linux security applications were not tailored for lay users. With TuxGuardian you'll be able to implement access control policies to the network resources in order to identify and control every application that tries to access the network.
I remember seeing a conversation in the UBuntu forums a while back. It was talking about how application level firewalls didn't offer much protection. Someone had asked about Zone Alarm for Linux. The reply was that it would be difficult to implement because many of the tools you want to access the net can also be used to do Bad Things. For example my Linux distribution uses wget to download updates. However, wget can be used by any script to upload information from your system or download payloads. If you block wget, you block both the good and bad applications that make use of it.
Zone Alarm checks to see if the binary has changed since it last connected to the net. This is good. However, does it also check all of the settings? Wouldn't it be possible to construct an application in Windows that seemed beneficial to end user and had the ability to update itself over the net? The application binary wouldn't need to change to do Bad Things. It could be a data file it uses, or a different site it points to.
I've seen some conversation concerning the restrictions available that can isolate an application to prevent this kind of damage. SELinux seems like a match. It is difficult to set up. However, it can control what various applications can access. AppArmor offers similar protection based on path names.
Linux needs a program that performs the same function as Zone Alarm
It is called Netfilter and it is built into the kernel. For low-level configuration, take a look at the iptables command. Several hundred programs offer "simpler" configuration tools, from command line to GUI. Take a look at the L7-filter for application layer packet classification.
The main difference between windows and linux is that the linux kernel has so many different versions, and not all distros are using the same one, so that it's hard to choose which kernel vulnerability to exploit. if 99% of people used linux, and were using the same distribution (with mostly the same kernel), believe me, these exploits would exist, and we would see viruses hitting linux machines over the network.
So, what you are saying, is everyone using the exact same code on their computers is a security risk. That if 20% used Windows, 20% used Ubuntu, 20% used BSD, 20% used OSX, and 20% used something else, overall security would increase. It makes you wonder why everyone insists on running the exact same code.
anecdotes =/= science
Not sure what your point was. Were you saying that there isn't any science in your post?
I found the answer in a wikipedia link provided in another message. The link suggests that the sleepiness is not caused by tryptophan alone. Rather, carbohydrates trigger the release of insulin. Insulin causes muscle to take in LNAA, but not tryptophan. This leaves a larger ratio of tryptophan in the blood to be taken across the blood-brain barrier into the central nervous system. There it is converted into serotonin. The serotonin is metabolized into melatonin. Melatonin makes you sleepy.
So, tryptophan by itself does not make you sleepy. However, tryptophan combined with carbohydrates leads to the right conditions needed to make you sleepy. It has nothing to do with stuffing yourself. Nor is tryptophan's involvement a myth. It just needs the right conditions. Skip the mashed potatoes and you shouldn't get sleepy from turkey.
Of course, the Nvidia-applet works fine, doing anything with the TV of my liking. But it would require the user to know that she uses a Nvidia card, and that there is another applet that she needs to use. Not good.
How is this different from Windows? If I want to do something special with graphics output under XP, I use the Intel applet that sits in the system tray. ATI and nVidia also have their own special applets under Windows.
If I had to guess, you have a somewhat old Intel chipset (945?). They have hardware limitations which prevent the total virtual screen from being > 2048x2048.
I've been wondering about this. My laptop has a 945 and dual-boots XP and Gentoo. Though I had to install a utility to get the monitor resolution to work with XP, XP has no problem putting 2048x1152 next to 1280x800. I can't get this to work on the Linux side. I can stack them top and bottom, but not side to side. If this is a hardware problem, how does XP get around it?
So I have to ask then, what in turkey does induce sleepiness? I don't believe it is a matter of stuffing yourself. For Christmas dinner, I traditionally eat duck. The rest of the meal is very similar to Thanksgiving dinner. Yet I don't feel sleepy after Christmas dinner. For that matter, I tend to eat about as much on Thanksgiving and Christmas as I do any other night. Yet the Turkey dinner is the only one that makes me sleepy. I can even eat a Turkey TV dinner and get sleepy.
Maybe it is not the tryptophan, but there is something in turkey that makes me sleepy.
The days are so far long gone when building your own box was a qualification for being a nerd (somewhat sadly, but only somewhat.) Now it is a qualification for being a factory worker, producing cheaply assembled and cheaply purchased commodities.
Huh? Showing an interest in how each component in the computer inter-operates no longer qualifies you as a nerd? I'll agree that the term "nerd" has greatly expanded to include a large field of specialized interests. However, an interest in computer hardware still qualifies. As to the factory workers, sure they know that part 4A6BX plugs into socket 893GH. However, putting that part into that socket 5 billion times a day hardly qualifies as an interest. Next you are going to tell me that soldering commonly available transistors, resistors, and other components together to build your own custom interfaces doesn't qualify.
but it should be decided by the board, not by one employee.
Ah yes, software requirements dictated by a board of computer illiterates that were elected into office by other computer illiterates. I agree that software selection should follow a policy. However, the school board should not be making those decisions. Though their input should be considered.
A good example: Linux is banned in our local school district. Why, because the school board mandated that all computers in the district run Norton Antivirus. How was this decided? A Best Buy salesman told a school board member that all of their computers come preinstalled with a three-month subscription to Norton Antivirus and that all computers need this protection. Thus it was mandated that all school computers specifically have Norton installed.
Basic cable costs money (and, hint, its not worth it). Unplug while you still can
I agree because I can get all of the things you list from OTA or the Internet. Now, the Internet isn't free. Truth is I pay way too much for the limited service I receive. However, OTA is free. In an area where you do have good OTA service, why would you pay for basic cable?
I can't see why this would matter.
I can. Where I work (as in most places I imagine), the IT department handles the network and helpdesk. IT also includes database administrators. While the database admins can write some really good SQL, they don't know jack about networks or computer maintenance. This is all fine and good. However, management doesn't know jack about IT. So we end up with a bunch of database administrators trying to run a network and maintain computers. And management wonders why everything is falling apart all of the time.
Keeping the titles separate might help management make the distinction between the database guys and network engineers.
I can't imagine how I'd go about tweaking my mobile phone to pick up HAM radio for instance.
Tune the crystals and get a longer antenna?
But for embedded/minimalist supporters, it means they need to add more hardware to their machines to support the now-larger kernel, chock full of features they'll never need or want.
I'm not a kernel programmer. So I don't know for sure which features are dependent on other features. However, if it is a matter of different feature sets, why not just disable the features you don't need? I've configured hundreds of Linux kernels. The kernel is highly customizable.
I have a Facebook account that I occasionally use to keep in touch with friends and family. I also rent videos from Blockbuster and I've ordered from Overstock. I've never had anything show up on my Facebook page that said anything about my shopping activities. Is this some kind of opt-in program?
Much is made of the possibility of obtaining He3, but 1) we have no earthly use for it, and 2) there's really not that much of it on the Moon either.
A potential gas source found on the moon's surface could hold the key to meeting future energy demands as the earth's fossil fuels dry up in the coming decades, scientists said
Yes, it still requires research and engineering. However, that is a far cry from "no earthly use for it".As for your second point, the article also covers that: "The moon contains 10 times more energy in the form of Helium 3 than all the fossil fuels on the earth," So you are right, it is a limited resource.
What material are you proposing that we could acquire in space more economically than on earth?
Helium-3 comes to mind. As to the composition of asteroids, I wasn't aware that a thorough examination of the asteroid belt had taken place. I know some asteroids have been studied. However, there is a lot of material out there.
Now, getting it back to Earth might be costly. However, I think it is a bit premature to claim that space doesn't have anything that couldn't be obtained cheaper on Earth.
we're expecting public schools to waste time telling kids not to burn disks?
Well, they will have to find time around telling kids their parents are bad people if their parents ever touch alcohol.
Have you ever seen the load of propaganda sent home with kids? It makes you wonder how they find time to take roll-call.
The news made me happy and led me to check in on the status of other once-prominent OSes
Though I'm not sure I'd call it prominent, I was really surprised to find that SpartaDOS for the Atari 8-bit is still actively being developed. The current version is 4.42, released on 12/25/2008. You can download it from http://trub.atari8.info/index.php?ref=sdx_upgrade_en
By the way, if anyone knows how to access the H1: drive from this OS under the atari800 emulator, please let me know. It keeps telling the device dosn't exist.
Give it time. Though Bob was just an interface, not a complete OS. I'm still waiting for someone to take a 3D avatar, combine it with natural speech processing, voice recognition, and speech synthesis, and sell it as an interface. With advances made in 3D on embedded devices, you could be asking Bob to dial a number for you.